Many business owners don’t understand SEO and what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to optimizing their online presence. Sure, they understand why they need SEO but when it comes to actually optimizing their site, many turn to an SEO consultant and assume that they’ll wave their magic SEO wand, fix all their problems and then charge them for it. This fantasy is wrong on all levels, as there is not SEO wand, not all SEO services are as capable, some of your SEO needs don’t require a consultant. While yes, a strong knowledge-base is needed when it comes to making major changes to your website for SEO purposes, there are many things that you can do on your own that will positively affect your rankings. Interested yet? Let’s find out 4 ways to clean up your SEO on your own!

1. Optimize Your Social Accounts

Now more than ever, social media is being taken seriously when it comes to search engine results and authority. You don’t have to just focus on one account either. Take a few hours out of your day to create accounts on all the major sites that are relevant to you and your industry. When creating these accounts don’t forget to optimize your content, both in your profile bio and your posts. The wonderful thing about this action is that you may not post regularly to some of these accounts, but because you’ve created and optimized your profile, you’ve essentially created a landing page for interested customers who will still be able to find out what you do and how to contact you or find you elsewhere online for more information. The more optimized accounts you have on relevant sites, the more likely those accounts will show up in results both through search engines and within the sites.

2. Check Who is Linking Back to Your Site

One of the most important things when it comes to higher rankings for your page is the number of inbound links back to your website from other web pages. Find out how many links your site has and where they’re coming from with help from Google Analytics. Go to the “Links to your site” section of the tool and start looking into which domains are linking to your site, how many links per domain and why they are linking to you. If you find that any of these links are over-optimized (a lot of links with the same anchor text), unnatural (obviously spammy) or just crappy links (not driving traffic to you) then you may be looking at the poor SEO tactics of a past consultant. These types of links may indicate that your site may have bought links in the past which is frowned upon in the SEO world today. If your site does have some of these types of links back to you, try to contact these sites and ask for them to delete the links.

3. Review Your Website’s Content

Before recent SEO updates, websites weren’t really ranked based on the type of content their pages had. If you had enough words on a page, you were golden. Now though, more advanced crawling techniques and technologies are making it so that your website needs more than just words on a page, it needs quality content. Scroll through the various pages of your website to see if everything on the page is necessary, unique and helpful to your visitors. If you realize that some of your pages have duplicate content, poor or nonexistent meta-descriptions or over-optimized sections (too many keywords in too little of space) then you may be open to SEO penalties from Google. Go through all of these pages and rewrite the content so that everything is original, trustworthy and useful and be sure to include relevant and verbose meta-descriptions of each page to help search engines better understand your pages.

4. Claim Your Local Listings

Just like with social media, the more local listing sites you’re on, the better. Find out where your company should be online with the help of GetListed.org and start claiming your businesses profiles. Most, if not all of these sites are free and require very little effort to claim. Once you’ve done so, start filling out the profiles with relevant and useful information including products/services, location(s) and contact information. Be sure to save all the credentials for these listings as you may need to update them over time as new products/services come out, you change locations or need to change contact information.

SEO is a tricky game, and one that almost always requires an expert. But when it comes down to it, there are still many things that you can do on your own that will save you money and your consultant time while helping your rankings. Give a few of these tips a shot and keep an eye on the analytics, you’ll be surprised at what small changes can do for you!

As one of the first hires at Revenue River, Marc has a passion for the company that rivals anyone. Marc takes strategy to a new level with anything and everything being planned out. That mentality has rubbed off on the rest of the company and took Revenue River to the next level. While Marc isn’t strategizing a social media campaign or the next integration, he’s on the soccer field strategizing his next play.